Roy Wilkins

Roy Wilkins (30 August 1901-8 September 1981) was Executive Director of the NAACP from 1955 to 1977, succeeding Walter Francis White and preceding Benjamin Hooks.

Biography
Roy Wilkins was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1901, the grandson of a slave. He graduated from the University of Minnesota and then worked as a journalist on the Kansas City Call, a newspaper for the black community. In 1931 he joined the NAACP, editing its journal Crisis from 1934 to 1949. Appointed chief executive of the NAACP in 1955, he consistently advocated the policy of legal redress in order to gain civil rights. Deeply committed to nonviolence, in August 1963 he was one of the organizers of the March on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr. and A. Philip Randolph. In 1968, he served on the US delegation to the International Conference on Human Rights. In his later years at the NAACP he came under increasing pressure from more militant blacks to move away from his non-violent integrationism. He retired in 1977, remaining a director emeritus of the NAACP. He died in 1981 at the age of 80.